Malindi was already a wealthy Swahili sultanate when Vasco da Gama sailed in on 15 April 1498 and left with a pilot for India. What survives is layered: Gede's coral ruins, a Portuguese chapel, Omani pillar tombs and colonial-era graves, all within 20km.
A 45-acre Swahili town abandoned around 1600 and swallowed by forest until 1927. Walk the Great Mosque, Palace, dated tomb of AH 802 (1399) and coral-rag houses with indoor plumbing. Open 08:00-18:00 daily; guides wait at the gate.
A 14th-century Swahili settlement on the bluff above Kilifi Creek, with two mosques, a cluster of pillar tombs and a Kufic inscription carved into the mihrab. Abandoned in the 17th century after Galla raids and drought.
Reputedly founded by Franciscans travelling with da Gama's fleet and consecrated by St Francis Xavier's contemporaries in the 1540s, this whitewashed single-room chapel is one of East Africa's oldest surviving churches, with a small walled cemetery of Portuguese sailors.
Twelve kilometres north, Mambrui's 15th-century pillar tomb still carries the Chinese celadon and Ming bowls set into its coral shaft — physical evidence of the Indian Ocean porcelain trade that also drew Zheng He's fleet to this coast in 1418.
Housed in a 1891 Indian-merchant building on the seafront, later the district office. Galleries cover Swahili material culture, the coelacanth caught off Malindi in 2001, and the town's role as a 19th-century slave and ivory transit port.
The Lisbon limestone cross above the coral base was raised in 1498 and moved to this headland after Portuguese forces relocated it; the cross itself is original stone from Portugal, unlike the local coral plinth carved to hold it.
Traces of the Portuguese garrison that held Malindi from 1509 until the capital shifted to Fort Jesus in Mombasa in 1593, alongside the 19th-century customs house where Omani-era duty on ivory and mangrove poles was collected.
A small Commonwealth-tended plot holding settlers, missionaries and casualties from the 1914-18 East African campaign, when British and German columns fought along this coast. Headstones record blackwater fever, drowning and dhow accidents.
The lanes behind the seafront hold Omani-era coral-and-lime houses with carved doors, the Bohra Ismaili mosque and Hindu temples built by Gujarati traders who arrived with the Imperial British East Africa Company in the 1890s.
Shipwrights still build and caulk jahazi hulls by hand on the foreshore using techniques described by Portuguese chroniclers. The monsoon trade that brought Omani, Gujarati and Persian vessels here twice a year still shapes the fishing calendar.
The last major stand of East African coastal forest, containing Mijikenda kaya sites — fortified hilltop villages founded in the 16th century and still guarded by elders. The Kaya forests hold UNESCO World Heritage listing since 2008.
Mambrui was a rival port to Malindi and the Sultan's residence; its mosque, sand-drift streets and the ruined 19th-century Sultan's house tell the story of a settlement that outlasted, then lost to, its southern neighbour.